Species War: Battlefield Mars Book 3

by David Robbins

He came up, smiling. “Howdy again, Doc. We sure do have a knack for running into trouble, don’t we?”

  “Private Everett!” Katla exclaimed, and forgetting herself, threw her arms around him.

  “It’s good to see you and Ms. Sahir, too,” Private Everett said. “But I’d best keep my arms free in case there are most of those critters.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Katla self-consciously released him and stepped back. “We’re just so happy to see you. We’re lost.”

  “We are?” Trisna said.

  A woman with a captain’s insignia on her EVA suit, leaning on a sergeant whose features were also familiar, spoke up, “Private Everett, you know these people?”

  “Fellow survivors from Wellsville and New Meridian, sir,” the Kentuckian said.

  Katla leaned toward the sergeant. “Sergeant Kline, is that you?”

  “In person, Doc,” the noncom said.

  “How did you find us?” Katla said in amazement. “How did you even know we were out here?”

  “We didn’t,” the officer said. “I’m Captain Ferris, by the way. We’re on our way to the airfield. Our infrared sensors picked you up.” She glanced at the dead Martians. “Just in time, it seems.”

  “We’re looking for the airfield, too,” Katla said. “Can we join you?”

  “Need you even ask?” Ferris said. “Fall in behind me. And keep your weapon handy.”

  “Gladly,” Katla said. As she moved to comply, she paused next to Everett. “Have you heard anything from Archard?”

  “No, ma’am,” Private Everett said. “Last I knew, he was at HQ.”

  “Head out,” Captain Ferris said. “Those drop ships aren’t going to wait around forever. Everett, you’re on point again.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mixed emotions flooded through Katla. Palpable relief that the troopers increased their chances of reaching the airfield safely, and deep dismay that Archard might be dead back inside the dome, and she had no way of knowing.

  “Be alive, damn you,” she whispered.

  49

  General Constantine Augusto’s mind reeled. His reality had come crashing down around him in shards of incredulity. The sheer rank horror of the astounding revelation the Martian had just made, and what it implied, defied all logic. “You can’t be what you claim,” he exclaimed.

  The red Martian did more tapping, moving the tip of its limb with a fluidity that was almost as disconcerting as its ability to use Earth tech so expertly.

  “General Augusto, permit me to introduce myself. In my previous life, I was known as Levlin Winslow, Chief Administrator at New Meridian.”

  “No!” Augusto gasped. He refused to believe it.

  “I was taken captive by the Martians, just as you have been.

  They tore off my head, just as they have done to nearly every Earther they encounter.”

  “No!” Augusto said again.

  “Haven’t you wondered why they do that? Why only the heads? The answer is simple. The head is the seat of our consciousness. And through a process I can’t begin to comprehend, through science far beyond anything on Earth, they transferred my consciousness into the body you see before you.”

  Augusto vigorously shook his head. “No, no, no.”

  The computer screen flashed anew. “I was in denial, too, at first. I nearly went mad. You have no idea what it was like to wake up in this body.”

  “God,” Augusto said.

  “Eventually, the Martians brought me out of myself,” the creature tapped. “I was given a new name, Kralun, and I acquired a mate…”

  “You what?”

  “…and I learned to immerse my consciousness in the Unity.”

  “The what?”

  “In short, General Augusto,” the former Earthman typed, “I was made into a Martian. Not just in body. In mind and heart and soul. I have given myself over to the Source of All.”

  General Augusto couldn’t take any more. “Hold on, hold on! You’re going too fast! None of this makes sense. I never met Levlin Winslow but I know who he was. And

  you claim to be him?”

  “I was born in Chicago. My wife’s name was Gladys. I was a career politician. My U.N. identification number…”

  “Wait,” General Augusto said. “What was that business about something called the Unity and the Source?”

  “The Martians, General, are a deeply spiritual species.”

  Augusto gazed at the abominations that filled the chamber. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “In battle, they try to kill as few of their enemies as possible. The rest they convert, as they did me and many of the people from New Meridian and Wellsville.”

  “You’re saying most of the colonists are alive?”

  “I’m saying that they are as I am,” the creature tapped. “A Gryghr. And before you ask, that is my caste. The blue warrior behind you is a Hryghr. Our castes are based on our function.”

  “What about that thing?” General Augusto said, pointing at the tall yellow creature at the front of the dais.

  “He is an Aryghr. A leader. As are those other two behind him.” Levlin Winslow or Kralun or whatever the creature called itself stopped tapping and its stalk eyes rose. “Do you recognize him?”

  “Why should I?” General Augusto said.

  “Because he is the one you thought you had captured. But who, in fact, let himself be taken prisoner so that he could direct our attack on Bradbury from within. And to take you prisoner, too, of course.”

  “Captain Rahn was right about that thing, then,” General Augusto said, more to himself than to the crab.

  “Archard Rahn? I knew him at New Meridian. I would have thought he had enough sense to be back on Earth by now. Not that that would do him any good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Levlin Winslow, now called Kralun, shifted toward the yellow leader and was motionless for all of a minute. Finally, the former administrator stirred and faced him.

  “What were you doing? Communicating somehow?” Augusto said.

  “We can all commune one with one another by immersing our sentience in the group consciousness of the Unity” the creature typed. “The closest Earth analogy as to how would be telepathy.”

  “Impossible.”

  “How can you be so naïve after all you have witnessed?” Kralun paused. “I was asking if it is permissible to answer your question about Earth.”

  “I’m more interested to learn what they intend to do with me.”

  “That should be obvious.” Kralun raised a gripper and pointed it at himself.

  Augusto felt sick inside at the idea of being turned into a hideous crab.

  “Your conversion is key to our overall strategy,” Kralun typed on. “With you on our side to advise our leaders, our war can enter its next phase.”

  “What are you on about now? What phase?”

  “Why, our invasion of Earth, of course.”

  50

  Captain Archard Rahn came within sight of the main airlock, expecting to find it jammed with troopers and civilians eager to reach the airfield and escape the chaos. Instead, he beheld a tangled carpet of bodies for a block around, mostly human but more than a few Martian. The humans were all missing their heads.

  Drawing up short, Archard raised his ICW. He boosted his motion sensors to the max but his holo display only registered twitching limbs. His infrared showed many of the human bodies were still warm.

  So where had the Martians gotten to that killed them?

  Archard warily went nearer. He tried his commlink, U.N.I.C.’s general frequency, and requested that any personnel within range respond. All he heard was static.

  Outside the dome, the dust had brought about a preternatural darkness. There could be a Martian swarm a stone’s throw from the nanosheath and Archard wouldn’t know it.

  From out of the depths of a building sliding into the ground came a scream of mortal terror that ended in a whimper.

 
Archard’s first instinct was to go to their aid. He was a trooper, after all. Protecting colonists was his primary mission. But to plunge into that sinking structure would be the equivalent of throwing his life away.

  He must live to reach Earth. Get the word out that the natives on the Red Planet were ruthless beyond belief and no amount of force thrown at them would make them agree to human colonization.

  Mars, Archard grimly reflected, had won the war of the worlds. The only thing for the Earthers still alive was to reach the fleet and head for home as fast as their EmDrives would take them.

  Picking his way over the dead, he was almost to the airlock when a noise from a side street down the block warned him that company was coming.

  Into the open scuttled a pack of twenty or so crustoids, their eye stalks waving, their grippers in an attack posture.

  “Crabs, crabs, and more crabs,” Archard muttered as he fed a frag grenade into the ICW’s firing tube. The control light went from red to green and he tilted the ICW for the right trajectory.

  The Martians spotted him and charged to the attack.

  Archard triggered the frag. The moment the tube whooshed, he fed in another, and fired again. Then a third. The first explosion blasted the nearest, the second crumpled creatures in the middle of the pack, the third blistered survivors trying to scatter. Only five were left but that was more than enough as they spread out and scrabbled with incredible speed to reach him. Backpedaling, he switched to full auto and stitched the fastest and another in its crustoid face when it jumped at his.

  That left three. They were smart and came at him from different directions, unbelievably quick. He couldn’t possibly drop them all before they reached him but he would try. He took aim at one to his left and riddled it and spun to shoot another on the right just in time to see a BioMarine come out of nowhere, seized the Martian by its legs, and tear the creature apart.

  The last one vaulted at Archard and he cored its shell.

  Her hand to her side, the BioMarine mustered a smile. “Nicely done.”

  “Thanks for the assist,” Archard said.

  “Booyah,” she said, coming over.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “I’ll live,” she replied. “I’m KLL-10. You’re Captain Rahn. I saw you with the general.”

  “How many others of…” Archard was going to say “your kind” but instead said, “…your unit are left?”

  “Would that I knew,” KLL-10 said. “I became separated from the rest in the stairwell. The Martians pulled me into a tunnel. How I broke free I will never know. There were so many.”

  “You made it topside. That’s what counts,” Archard said.

  “If you say so.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Beyond the obvious?” KLL-10 said, moving her hand enough for him to see the full extent of her wound. It was deep, and she had bled a lot. “I have been trying to reach others in my unit on my commlink but all I get is static.”

  “Same here.”

  “I can’t be the only one of us to make it out,” KLL-10 said.

  “I just can’t.”

  Archard became aware of the continued blaring of the evacuation order. “You hear that? I’m on my way to the airfield. You should come with me.”

  KLL-10 gazed sadly about. “I guess there’s nothing more we can do here. Although I’m not supposed to abandon humans in need.”

  Although he was unsure which of them outranked the other, Archard said, “Consider it an order.”

  KLL-10 smiled. “Thank you, Captain. Yes, I will accompany you. Perhaps together we can live long enough to make it off this wretched planet.”

  “I hear that,” Archard said.

  51

  General Constantine Augusto had never heard anything so preposterous. “You’re looney, Winslow or Kralun or whatever the hell you call yourself. There’s no way the Martians can attack Earth. They don’t have spacecraft.”

  Kralun tapped on his pad and the screen displayed, “An entire fleet waits for us in orbit.”

  “Our fleet,” General Augusto said in contempt. “Which the Martians don’t know how to operate. Not even turncoats like you can. You were in admin, not a space jockey. It takes special training. Years of it. Which you don’t have. Our fleet is where you can’t ever reach it.”

  “The drop ships can,” Kralun typed.

  General Augusto was losing his patience. “Again,” he said angrily, “It takes a pilot to fly one. And I gave specific orders that the drop ship pilots were to stay at the airfield. Unless your crustacean friends have captured one, there’s no way you’re getting off this planet.”

  “We have not captured a pilot, no,” Kralun typed. “Even if we had, the conversion process takes a considerable while. The wisest recourse for us, therefore, is for your pilots to fly us to the spacecraft in orbit.”

  “As if they would,” General Augusto sneered.

  “They would if they were unaware we were on board their drop ships,” Kralun typed. “Are you familiar with the concept of stowaways, General?”

  Augusto glared. The thing was mocking him.

  “At this very moment, an evacuation is underway,” Kralun tapped. “Any humans still alive are fleeing to the airfield. And we are taking particular pains to ensure some of them reach it.”

  “No,” Augusto gasped as the full scope of the Martian strategy sank in.

  “Yes. Presently, the drop ships will presently lift off, achieve orbit, and dock with the spacecraft that brought them.” Kralun’s prismatic eyes seemed to gleam with triumph. “Taking a lot of us with them.”

  “Hold on,” General Augusto said. “You’ve outsmarted yourselves. Our drop ships and our spaceships are pressurized. Fourteen pounds per square inch, exactly like on Earth.”

  “So?”

  “So what is it here on Mars? Barely a pound per square inch?” Augusto laughed. “You’ll be crushed like the bugs you are.”

  “You might be interested to learn that while your species is so fragile it can’t survive on our world’s atmosphere without special suits, our hard shells enable us to survive under Earth’s pressure quite well.”

  “But you need to breathe, don’t you?” Augusto said. “Our air isn’t the same as yours. You’d suffocate.”

  “Yes, Earth’s atmosphere is seventy-eight percent nitrogen and twenty-one percent oxygen, while ours is ninety-five percent carbon dioxide and two percent

  nitrogen,” Kralun typed, and his eyes lifted to Augusto. “Guess which we breathe?”

  “The carbon dioxide?”

  “No. It is mainly a surface gas. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Martians are an underground race.”

  General Augusto was struck speechless by the implications.

  “Our scientists believe we can survive in Earth’s atmosphere quite well. The greater gravity might be an issue. But we will adapt, as the Unity always does.”

  Augusto shook his head. “There’s a flaw in your reasoning. How many can you possibly smuggle onto the drop ships? Dozens? Maybe a few hundred? Earth’s population is in the billions. You won’t stand a prayer.”

  “That would be true if our numbers stayed static. But you see. Those billions you allude to will be converted, as I was, and most of the other colonists.”

  “Hold on,” Augusto said. “You told me that the Martians transferred your consciousness into that red crab, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “They did the same with the other colonists? A Martians body for each one?”

  “Yes.”

  General Augusto smiled smugly. “Where are all the Martian bodies going to come from for those billions of Earthers? Are you going to wave a magic wand, and

  presto, there they are?”

  “That is our secret, General,” Kralun typed.

  “Eh?”

  “Never forget, General. Our science is vastly superior to yours. Especially our biological sciences.”

  “You’re bluffing.”
>
  On the computer screen appeared the reply, “Am I?”

  “God, no,” Augusto said.

  Kralun continued tapping. “Your own conversion is about to commence. I envy you the joy in store when you experience the Unity for the first time.”

  Before Augusto could so much as blink, the four creatures who had brought him to the chamber sprang and seized his arms and legs. “Wait!” he shouted.

  Kralun waggled a gripper as if waving goodbye.

  Twisting and thrashing, Augusto sought to break loose. But he was helpless in their grasp. They bore him out of the chamber and down a different series of ramps to a rock-hewn corridor many levels below. Entering a room, they halted.

  Sheer terror rippled down General Augusto’s spine.

  The room was lined with shelves filled with rows of severed human heads, some so recently added that they dripped blood.

  In the center were rock slabs on which a strange apparatus bubbled and hissed, attended by brown Martians unlike any General Augusto had seen. As he looked on in bewilderment, one of the brown creatures came toward him.

  “I refuse, you hear me?” Augusto railed. “I won’t let you turn me into a monster!”

  Paying him no heed, the brown Martian bent and reached for his head.

  52

  Captain Archard Rahn was sure it wasn’t his imagination. The dust was thinning.

  By his estimation, he and KLL-10 were about halfway to the airfield. They were going slowly, warily, every sensor in his EVA suit at max.

  So far, the only Martians they came across were dead ones. A lot of dead humans, too, soldiers for the most part but too many civilians as well.

  Archard couldn’t believe his string of calamities. He’d survived the attack on New Meridian, the first colony to fall, and managed to reach the second, Wellsville, only to be forced to go through the whole ordeal again. Not satisfied with putting him through hell twice, Fate had brought the third colony crashing down around his helmet. Or, rather, sinking down.

  “If I didn’t have bad luck,” he muttered, “I wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

  “Sorry?” KLL-10 said.